July 2026 Roundup

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cover photo from Sekiro : Shadows Die Twice

Oof. At some point we flew past the midpoint of summer and I feel like I still haven’t done much with mine so far. Definitely feeling the need to plan some sort of vacation in the next month or two, even if it just involves me staying at home and diving into my games backlog.

Speaking of the backlog, this month’s roundup features two games from 2019, two horror games involving cursed software, and the friendslop hit of the summer playing the role as the awkward fifth wheel. Some really good stuff in here this month, so let’s get into it.

As if Windows couldn't get any more cursed

Desktop Explorer

Overall Score

★ ★

Highly Recommended

Oh how I love a good diegetic interface in a video game. I think over time I’ve come to appreciate how much the subtleties of a well-designed and good-looking UI does for the immersion of a title, because I sure notice it now when it looks like an interface has been tacked-on as an afterthought. Games that mimic old PC user interfaces are becoming more common as people look back wistfully upon a much simpler and more rough-edged era of computing, and I think even without my personal nostalgia I’d still appreciate these.

Desktop Explorer is a game that asks “what if Windows 95, but cursed?” Your viewpoint character is a young woman who has just inherited an old PC from her beloved uncle Hal and has decided to try to excavate any information she can from it. This will lead her down a rabbit hole of family secrets and perhaps help to solve the mystery of a family member’s disappearance once and for all. It accomplishes this through a very impressive recreation of a mid-90s Windows-like interface. Through this fake OS, you will be asked to solve various puzzles that require you to use the OS’s features in unconventional and creative ways.

So yeah, about that “cursed” part. This PC you’ve inherited has a program installed on it (or infected with?) called Desktop Explorer, which represents itself through a quirky little anthropomorphized notepad mascot called Pizarro. It’s giving shades of an ominous version of Clippy, which I’m sure is what the developers were going for. Now I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a horror aficionado; I despise cheap jumpscares and tend to stay mostly on the psychological horror side of the spectrum. You can probably source that back to having unlimited access as a teenager to an early 2000s internet which was full of horrifying shock sites and screamer jumpscare pranks — that era of the internet was a bizarre and wild place.

Fortunately, no zombies or scary ghosts are going to be popping up in your face and screaming. Desktop Explorer relies more on fostering a creepy atmosphere of mystery and dread, and I’d call the handful of scares it serves up to be fairly mild overall. The mystery it has you digging into is excellent though, as you uncover more and more about the PC’s previous users and what this rogue program did to them. This is a puzzle game first and foremost, and a fantastic one at that. The problems it puts in front of you to solve often require some creative and non-linear thinking, and there were so many moments where I thought up an unconventional way of interacting with something only to find that it was the intended solution for the puzzle. This is how the best puzzle games operate, sprinkling about enough individual clues so that you can synthesize that “aha” moment that makes everything click.

Desktop Explorer mostly leans on your use of the filesystem and the various programs on the PC to solve puzzles in the first main section, but rather than resting on its laurels it impressively expands its gameworld in the following chapters. You will be exploring an abandoned online space ala Second Life and even getting familiar with the PC’s terminal in later parts. Think of it as a mashup between something like Hypnospace Outlaw (also excellent and recommended) and last year’s Blue Prince. I highly recommend it to my fellow puzzle game enthusiasts if you’re looking for something compelling, unique, and perhaps a bit creepy.

A symphony of ringing steel

Sekiro : Shadows Die Twice

Overall Score

★

Recommended

Frequent readers may recall that back in April I played and quite loved Nine Sols, a combat-centric Metroidvania with excellent visual design and parry mechanics. I promised a few friends recently that I’d go back and play the game that it shares the most DNA with, and I’m pleased to report that Sekiro : Shadows Die Twice has lived up to all expectations; I’m actually shocked I hadn’t plucked it out of my backlog sooner.

Sekiro is set in a fantastical version of 16th century Sengoku-era Japan; the main thrust of the story centers around the fate of Kuro, heir to a divine bloodline that makes him immortal. Wolf, the faithful shinobi sworn to his service, is the character that you take control of in pursuit of Kuro’s wish of ending this dubious blessing; the young Lord is a pawn in a political scheme and becomes caught in-between several factions vying for the power of immortality that he holds. Much like From Software’s other games, this basic premise is all you really need to know, and the details are filled in from a smattering of character interactions and other worldbuilding conveyed by visual design, architecture, and of course the detailed item descriptions.

I’ve long been a fan of Fromsoft games. I skipped a few in the middle of their roster (Sekiro being one of them), but the original Demon’s Souls and of course its hugely influential followup Dark Souls were formative games for me. Fromsoft games are known for being quite difficult without very many levers to pull to influence their difficulty, and as far as I know none of them have an explicit difficulty setting. This has been somewhat controversial, but in many of them you could still mitigate some of the difficulty via building your character in a specific way. 2023’s Elden Ring was a great example of this; the possible ways to customize your character were numerous. I personally chose a Strength/Faith build that had me dual-wielding claymores for big bonkage and big stagger, but alternatively you could build toward almost the opposite, using consumable items to poison or weaken your foes, and keeping your distance while taking chunks out of their healthbar with spells. Buildcrafting is a big draw of those games and allows for a lot of player expressivity.

Sekiro is almost exactly the opposite, but not to its detriment. Wolf has a predetermined set of abilities (expandable and enhanceable by several skill trees) that you will need to learn to use for the entire duration of the game. Rather than giving you flexibility in your build, Sekiro practically grabs you by the throat and makes you sit up, pay attention, and master its moveset if you want to succeed. The early game definitely has a learning curve and it will undoubtedly lose some people here, but for those that persevere, what is here is a highly kinetic and incredible combat system. Whereas Dark Souls and Elden Ring demand that you learn spacing from your enemy and how to use dodge rolls, Sekiro is all about the deflection, baby. All enemies (and Wolf himself) have both a health bar and a posture bar, the latter of which builds up when you perfect parry their attacks, cause damage to them, or they block your attacks. When the posture bar fills completely, they are stance broken and you can perform a deathblow on them. This is enough to kill most weaker enemies, but minibosses and the game’s major encounters will require you to land two or sometimes even three deathblows to finish the fight.

This system hugely rewards learning the enemy attack patterns so that you can get those sweet series of perfect parries that will throw your enemies off-balance, and when not defending you should always be aggressive so as not to let them regain their posture. “Hesitation is defeat” is a common meme from this game for good reason. This is one of the rare games that has let me reach that fabled flow state while playing it; when the combat clicks and you’re parrying, counterattacking, and executing one enemy after the other, it is a feeling of power and satisfaction that is indescribable. Sword strikes are weighty, and enemy designs and animations are excellent across the board. With only a few possible exceptions, the boss encounters are very challenging but ultimately fair, and had me pumping my fist and jumping out of my chair after clutching out close victories. Before my experience of playing Dark Souls I’m not sure I would have described myself as someone who sought out difficult games, but it and its successors certainly taught me the value of perseverance and how good it feels to come out victorious in the end. I’m all for greater accessibility in most games, but Fromsoft has proven time and again that there is an undeniable allure in a carefully-crafted difficult experience.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice has lived up to all the glowing praise I’ve heard and then some. As much as I revere Dark Souls and From Software’s other projects such as Elden Ring and Armored Core, in my opinion it takes the #1 spot as the best game they’ve ever made. If you think you have it in you to surmount that initial learning curve and walk the perilous path of the shinobi, I cannot recommend it enough.

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodnight

Sayonara Wild Hearts

Overall Score

★

Recommended

Back in May’s edition I lamented my recent struggle of finding a rhythm game that I really clicked with. I’ve always loved the genre all the way back to my days playing Dance Dance Revolution at my local arcades (which I still do over 20 years later). Rhythm Doctor was endearing but had some glaring flaws toward the end of the game, and my experience with D-Cell’s Unbeatable was… mixed, to say the least. The next stop on my quest for a satisfying rhythm game was Simogo’s Sayonara Wild Hearts, a game I’d frequently heard about but had been perpetually backlogged until now.

The first thing I’ll say is that it’s less of a rhythm game than I initially believed it to be; it’s an autoscrolling action game where your primary objective is to maneuver to pick up heart tokens that increase your score as you race through the various (and often stunning) levels. There are some sections where you tap the interact button along with the beat to dodge enemy attacks, but it’s mostly score chasing while enjoying the visual glitz and the excellent soundtrack. It really has to be seen to be understood, so I offer up a video of one of the earlier stages for your consideration :

The best description I’ve heard for Sayonara is a “playable pop album.” The tale is presented through some narrative bits (narrated by the one and only Queen Latifah) and a whole lot of visual storytelling. It tells the tale of the protagonist overcoming heartbreak, bitterness, and disappointment to grow as a person and gain the ability to love and pursue her passions once again. It’s quite a feast for the eyes while you’re racing through the detailed, dynamically-shifting levels, but the upbeat synth-pop soundtrack is the main draw. It often had me tapping my foot and bobbing my head to the beat, and I’ve added several of its tracks to my ever-growing list of game soundtrack favorites.

It is also a VERY short game; my entire playthrough came in at just around an hour or so. There are some additional, optional challenges you can undertake if you’re really digging the gameplay, but I think I was satisfied at the end of my brief time with it. This developer is mostly known for mobile games, which makes its length and format make a lot more sense in context. I definitely found far less to dislike about it than the games I mentioned earlier, but was also left wanting more of it. It was released in 2019 and often goes on sale, so if you’re in the mood for a nice audiovisual snack that you can play through in a single sitting, Sayonara Wild Hearts may just fit the bill.

OK, maybe the moral panic was justified

Forbidden Solitaire

Overall Score

★ ★

Highly Recommended

Well, July certainly was a good month for horror in the style of retro PC gaming, because here’s another easy recommendation in a similar lane to Desktop Explorer. A few years back I picked up a game by Night Signal Entertainment called Home Safety Hotline, a game where the player takes the role of a telephone operator who takes calls about paranormal occurrences and helps the caller identify and rectify their mild haunting, or possibly, impending tragedy. I would say that I liked it but didn’t quite love it, but the retro PC interface it presented itself through and the grainy, blurry images of various cryptids provided by callers made for a fun, creepy atmosphere regardless.

For their next title, Night Signal teamed up with the husband-and-wife pair that makes up Grey Alien Games, who over the last decade have specialized in the very specific niche of creating solitaire games, and by all accounts have made sustainable careers out of it. This collaboration between the two studios has resulted in a bona fide hit; Forbidden Solitaire marries Grey Alien’s polished solitaire gameplay with Night Signal’s delightful and purposefully-schlocky crude 3D and early FMV game aesthetic to create a sum much greater than its parts.

This looks like one of those point-and-click adventure games from the 90s that featured low-detail, pre-rendered 3D visuals but make no mistake — the one and only verb you use to interact with your environment is a game of solitaire. Need to hide from a prowling beast out for your blood? Solitaire. In a life-or-death confrontation with an abomination that refuses to die? That’s a Solitaire. Contemplating the nature of a mysterious orb you found? You guessed it, deal them cards. It’s a good thing that the core gameplay is so engaging because you’ll be doing a lot of it, and it’s truly a credit to Grey Alien’s craft.

Sometimes the solitaire game pits you against an enemy, tasking you with whittling down their health by chaining cards and effects together before they deplete your own health. Others are more puzzle-like, asking you to clear the game board before your deck runs down to its last card. Forbidden Solitaire puts its own spin on the game it’s based upon by adding cards that have special effects or detriments, such as armor cards that protect you from X amount of damage for a single turn, crystallized cards that damage you when playing them, or cursed cards that reduce the damage you do to your opponent as long as they’re face-up on the board. You also get a limited hand of special effect cards that can get you out of a bind or crank up the damage on an already massive combo. There’s definitely some strategy involved in when you choose to pass a turn and draw from your deck, when you trigger buff cards to mitigate your foe’s heavy hits, and when you decide to burn your inventory of consumables to rack up a long combo for big damage. The enemy’s next move is always displayed at the top of the screen so you can plan your counterplay accordingly.

As someone who lived through the game industry’s growing pains of the 1990s, the aesthetic is bang-on accurate, often being very tongue-in-cheek when dealing with the conventions and, let’s say… boundary-pushing of games of that period and how they were marketed. The pre-rendered 3D background scenes and FMV videos depicting the fictional game’s advertisements and resulting public backlash made me laugh out loud more than once (keep an eye out for a hilarious cameo from Strange Scaffold’s Xalavier Nelson Jr). Forbidden Solitaire is presented as a game within a game, a cursed piece of software obtained at a thrift store that you’re playing on a more modern PC. The mystery slowly unravels as you get deeper into the game and start receiving increasingly alarming messages from your sister who is doing research on the game and picking up clues about what happened to its developers. It’s good stuff. It’s great to see two indie developers strike gold like this. Forbidden Solitaire is a gem in every respect; the compelling card game and the mystery at its core make it a hell of a ride.

Surprisingly, not a game about robot lizards

Meccha Chameleon

Overall Score

★ ★

Highly Recommended

If you get any gaming content in your social media feeds, you are probably aware of the breakout indie friendslop hit that is Meccha Chameleon. You may have even played it yourself, given that it’s dirt cheap, runs on anything with more computing power than a toaster, and has reportedly sold over 15 million copies to date.

This is another one of those games that is incredible when you have a group of friends to play it with. It’s basically a hide-and-seek where one team of players paints themselves to blend in with the various landscapes of the built-in levels (or the many, many custom maps available through the Steam Workshop) and another team of hunters seeks them out. Simple, but executed extremely well. There are so many reels of people inventing absolutely devious hiding spots, and the tools provided really allow players to flex their imaginative chops. As I said, it’s dirt cheap so if you have a group of gaming friends to play with and an ounce of creativity, there’s no reason not to give it a try and see what kind of masterwork you can create. But if nothing else, you can always look up the game on your short-form media platform of choice and enjoy it vicariously.

Forbidden Solitaire on Mike's Musings

July 2026 Roundup